Twitter explained further on its service status website, "During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01am.

"We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service. The site was fully recovered by 11:47am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Awkwardly enough, the outage occurred just as Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took to the stage in Austin, Texas, to speak at the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSW), the annual gathering of information technology enthusiasts that helped propel Twitter to national fame in 2007.